1985/Gardner/Criticism
Cognitive science What is it all about? : It goes beyond, so to speak, socio-psycho-linguistics. We live on a mix of material, energy, and information. The last is a name for signs from within and without, including our own ideas, feelings and memories, to which we refer and from which we infer. In a way, we process, assess, and profess signs, ill or well. Words express them perhaps most surely, explicitly. They themselves in turn serve as signs. Yet either words or signs look like only the surfaced tip of the iceberg called the mind. The implicit, tacit, submerged mass below should be taken for granted. As yin pairing with yang, this may remain a critical mass enough for full awareness of aboutness. To make the implicit explicit, we need to infer from what we refer to, to assess information given, or to interpret not only words but also signs in general in terms of meaning, whether signification or significance. To take information as meaning rather than "as thing" (Buckland, 1991; Farradane, 1979) is to take it as the potential of acting on the mind, as compared with energy acting on the matter, regardless of the physical form of either. To the contrary, either books or cooks could be abstracted to a physical form, regardless of the identity in meaning or cooking. Such may be the Good News Bible of little significance and much nuisance to Christian fundamentalists. Abstraction often ends up with silly simplism. Signs repeat themselves, more or less recurringly and uniformly. Situated and conditioned in recurring context, our varied experience of signs matters perhaps far more sharply than our inborn competence as the constant cognitive overhead. Perhaps we would be better concerned why people behave rather individually, relatively than universally, generatively, predictively. Experience is accumulated so as to be recalled and used on and on even more variably. As such, it is somewhat analogous to information storage and retrieval. Yet both ways may be too different to match deeply with each other, to share the same deep structure. Why is it needed addedly? : Information makes cognition. And, the more makes the better. The reductionist dictum "less is more," perhaps reinforced by "small is beautiful" (Schumacher, 1973) is quite misleading. The higher bird's eye view, the wider horizon. In general, the more information makes the better cognition. Ogden & Richards (1923) extended the linguistic, literary context to the extra-linguistic, psychological and external contexts. A recent renewed recognition is that cognition is situated in complex context. Cognitive (revolutionary) science was the outcome of the cognitive (scientific) revolution. Yet it is unclear which is the hen, which is the egg, and which is earlier at all. As psychology is, so to speak, science of mind, the "mind's new science" (Gardner, 1985) is simply new psychology, though it may be called "cognitive science" in vogue. Then what should be the difference of the old and new versions of psychology. It is mostly suggested that new psychology is very unhappy about behaviorism dealing with the mind being influenced by the external, environmental, empirical factors, quite regardless of the internal, mental, especially inborn and rational factors. How did it come into being? : It was a byproduct of a direct approach to information retrieval. Suppose a case of information retrieval (IR) using keywords.